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Thanks for the quote about the ents and Bombadil , Hornblower.
And here is a visual summary of the ( rather bizantine) discussion of sources ( made in the previous two pages of this topic) that were , probably, used in the genesis of Tom Bombadil. I hope that this form of approach will help more persons at understanding my ideas about the matter:
In the first place let's repeat the relevant quote of Hammond and Scull's entry ( with a minor correction made by me that appear with a red font)
Tinfang Warble. Poem, published probably in the mid-1920s; Tolkien pre served a copy of the leaf on which it was printed. A holograph list of his poems by Tolkien indicates the name of the publication as T U Mag'; John Garth in Tolkien and the Great War (2003) is correct that this was the Inter-University Magazine, published by the University Catholic Societies' Federation of Great Britain. See also *The Grey Bridge ofTavrobel, which was published in the same magazine, though not in the same issue. Tinfang Warble was reprinted in *The Book of Lost Tales, Part One (1983), p. 108.
Tinfang, or Timpinen, is a piper in *The Book of Lost Tales, 'a wondrous wise and strange creature' (The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, p. 94) who plays and dances in summer dusks; children call him 'Tinfang Warble'. The poem suggests his music ('O the hoot! O the hoot! / How he trillups on his flute!') and his movements ('Dancing all alone, / Hopping on a stone, / Flit ting like a faun'). Tinfang Warble is also featured in the poem *Over Old Hills and Far Away. John Garth has suggested that the figure 'had a contem porary visual counterpart in a painting that [as a commercial print] found a mass-market' among British soldiers in the First World War: 'Eleanor Canziani's Piper of Dreams ( the correct is Estella Canziani), which ... depicts a boy sitting alone in a springtime wood playing to a half-seen flight of fairies' (p. 77). And yet Tinfang Warble is consistently animated rather than seated, and clearly himself from the tradition of fairies and sprites (in the earliest version of the poem he is a 'leprawn, i.e. leprechaun), while the enticing sound of his flute recalls the pip ing of Pan: compare, for instance, 'the merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear happy call of the distant piping' of "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' in * Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908).
Tinfang Warble exists in three versions, the earliest manuscript of which is dated 29-30 April (1915, though Tolkien indicated on a later typescript that the work was written at Oxford in 1914). He revised it at Leeds in 1920-3, and once again for publication
And here is Estella Canziani's Piper of Dreams. It resembles someone else, doesn't it? At least the colour scheme seems rather familiar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estella_Canziani
An analysis of the picture and its impact , entitled ( somewhat ironicaly )The Piper at the Gates of War.
http://grahamward.blogspot.com/2009/01/blog-post_7845.html
I think that Tolkien mixed the original Piper of Dreams that was the influence to Tinfang Warble with Vainamoinen and , thus, created Tom Bombadil, using the features that appeared in the Dutch Doll ( it was already, quite influenced by the Piper of Dreams too, I think, and , probably , Tolkien was aware of this , due to the peacock's feather that he, later, replaced by a swan's feather.
And here is an old picture of a Leprechaun
It seems to me that there is a close relationship between this version of the Piper of Dreams and the cover of Wind in the Willows copied right below it. Its "Bombadillian" ( as Halfir himself is calling it now) chapter, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, seems to be the origin of Estella Canziani's painting that was the source to Tinfang Warble
A modern picture of the Green Man inspired by the Piper of Dreams ( painting by Margareth Walty)
Tom Shippey has made the comparison with the Green Man and , therefore with the "Celtic" sources that also include the Green Knight ( of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) and Jack in the Green ( quote from The Road to Middle Earth,( pages 97-98).
Tom Bombadil, then, is fearless. In some way he antedates the corruptions of Art. According to Elrond he is 'Iarwain Ben-adar oldest and fatherless'. Like Adam, also fatherless, 'whatsoever[he] called every living creature, that was the name there of.Unlike the descendants of Adam he does not suffer from the curseof Babel; everybody understands his language by instinct. It is odd, though, that Tom shares the adjective 'oldest' with another being in The Lord of the Rings, Fangorn the Ent, whom Gandalf calls 'the oldest living thing that still walks beneath the Sun' (II,102). An inconsistency? It need not be so, if one accepts thatTom is not living - as the Nazgul and the Barrow-wight are notdead. Unlike even the oldest living creatures he has no date of birth, but seems to have been there since before the Elves awoke,a part of Creation, an exhalation of the world. There are hints in old poems of such an idea. The Old English poem Genesis B,originally written in Old Saxon, at one point calls Adam self- guma, which could be translated calquishly as 'self-shaped man'. Modern translations prefer to say 'self-doomed' or something of the sort, while the Bosworth-Toller Dictionary prefers 'a man by spontaneous generation'. Adam of course wasn't spontaneously generated. But Tolkien may have wondered what the thing behind such a word could be. He must have also reflected on the strange Green Knight who comes to challenge Sir Gawain in the poem he had edited in 1925, like Tom Bombadil unflapp-able, a lusus naturae in size and colour, conveying to many criticsa sense of identification with the wild wintry landscape fromwhich he appears, called by the poet in respectful but uncertain style an aghlich mayster, 'a terrible Master'. The green man, the uncreated man, the man grown by 'spontaneous generation' ...
From what? Obviously, from the land. Tom Bombadil is a genius loci. But the locus of which he is the genius is not the barren land of the Green Knight's Pennine moors, but the river and willow
country of the English midlands, or of the Thames Valley. He represents, as Tolkien said himself, 'the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside' (Letters, p. 26).
The comparison with Pan was also made by several authors
http://books.google.com.br/books?id=vKcxQA7zig0C&pg=PA77&dq=tom+bombadil+god+pan
And here is Vainamoinen
That is also compared with Bombadil:
http://books.google.com.br/books?id=8LLxZXqgJdwC&pg=PA298&dq=tom+bombadil+vainamoinen#v=onepage&q=tom%20bombadil%20vainamoinen&f=false
Take a look in this picture showing Vainamoinen trying to catch Aino, a reluctant bride of him
Hammond and Scull in Tolkien's Companion and Reader Guide also cite in page 442
David Elton Gay sees Vainamoinen, often described as old', as a source for Tom Bombadil in *The Lord of the Rings. For both "power comes from their command of song and lore rather than from ownership and domination. Vainamoinen spends his time in endless singing, not singing songs of power, however, but rather songs of know ledge. Indeed, it would appear that he, like Tom Bombadil, sings for the simple pleasure of singing....
To have power over something in the mythology of the Kalevala one must know its origins and be able to sing the appropriate songs and incantations concerning these origins. Great power in the world of the Kalevala requires great age and great knowledge, and Vainamoinen has both. A large part of his power comes from the fact that as the oldest of all living things he saw the creation of things, heard their names, and knows the songs of their origins, and it was his works which helped give shape to the land. The same is clearly true of Tom Bombadil. ['J.R.R. Tol kien and the Kalevala: Some Thoughts on the Finnish Origins of Tom Bombadil and Treebeard', Tolkien and the Invention of Myth:
Then I think that ALL these sources , blended, mixed and boiled in the Great Cauldron of Tolkien giving , eventualy, form to Tom Bombadil. Celtic sources are only part of the the great bricolage that spawned Bombadil.
I hope that this post might have summarized the matter with more fruitful results and . bring to the topic a more health climate
Best regards
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